Ah, the branding generation.

Leave it to Simon Reynolds to dub it so here, he’s got a confused notion that we’ve confused his commentary on Situationist International precept.

Not at all.

Sex Pistols weren’t musicifying in 1968, ahem, but McLaren was making an institution of it all, and regardless the overriding critique that scholars in the 1980s disenfranchised artists by categorizing them as a retrospective bunch wasn’t addressed. Alas, as a disclaimer, this blog was written in an allnighter to finish a college course at the University of Texas. So, I admit it was written with haste. But come on Simon, we’re not living in the past. Though we’re trying to write 'em like they used to.

Create Austin is a “business” turned collective of artists, and what we’re producing is a brand hellbent on making Austin’s artists and musicians a buck in light of overpriced advert agencies swarming the industry. Cut us some slack on the scholarly tip, our upcoming exhibit with pedophilic bible stories and presidential cabinet assassination portraits might make a fine addendum to our retrospective—and perhaps yours.

Thanks for reading.

THE AUSTIN SCHOOL:

A HISTORY OF SUBCULTURE

1: “Frankly, Mr. Shankly.”

            “Oh, to be young again,” many remark when reminiscing about the opportunities that youth affords. Yet, well spent youth is certainly an oxymoron, and youthful mistakes are the building blocks for maturity. Youth, a period for immutable growth, is the retrospective envy of any who are no longer young. Looking back, however, the growing pains of adolescence are often overshadowed in the eyes of the wise by a sense of envy for the opportunity, time, and innocence beheld by the young.

            It is, therefore, no surprise that when British youth culture gained cachet in the mid-20^th Century, when subcultures were first noted in media and academia, its documenters were outsiders simply fascinated by their subjects. Independence, frivolity, and rebellion were used by British male youths to excite and entice young women, create a sense of belonging, and those same powers were jealously regarded as wistful, accidental, and misspent by credentialed onlookers profiting on analysis of the subculture phenomenon. Outsiders were at the helm of interpreting youth culture phenomena to mainstream Britain, while insiders were silenced by their class. Because they were looking in on an alien culture, the first academic histories on youth subcultures overlooked the primary impulse of youth: to get laid.

            British youth lashed out against class-based confinement by making a statement through style—excluding outsiders and consequently elevating their own importance—by making their environment smaller, more navigable. Controlled by censors and bourgeois publicity, the establishment managed to contain any attempts by emergent subcultures from having a voice.  But the “quietism” suggested by Colin MacInnes was a premature ideal, the unity of subculture was voiceless, and, until a consumer market geared toward youth was significant enough to uniquely engage and infest culture, youth’s influence could not incite change. Without a consumer market, without effecting the economy, without a currency of value to the capitalist establishment, power remains in the hands of the rich, nepotism protects their wealth and status, influence is monopolized, and there is little reason to give voice to dissent.

2. “Anger is an energy.”

            “1988 is the year of … 1968,” Simon Reynolds and Paul Oldfield write in an article entitled “The Impossible Dream” as part of Reynold’s book Blissed Out. “Retrospectives and reappraisals” abound in the media, they write, and summarize the current rave and counter-culture in Britain as “elegies for a lost spirit of militancy, to post-mortems that exhume the body of revolution only to bury it the deeper in prehistory.”

            These “post-mortems” are the contemporary musicians and artists of 1988, whose style and political sentiments appear to the “teeming” media as mere reflections of an era lost, specifically the height of the punk rock movement in 1968. Jean Baudrillard and Sylvere Lotringer, postmodern theorists, are quoted at the beginning of “The Impossible Dream” with retrospectives equally as reminiscent about the paramount efficacy and originality of the 1968 punk movement. “‘The cause of an event is always imagined after the fact. After that jolly May [1968] we were treated to the curious spectacle of causes racing after effects,’” Lotringer is quoted as saying from his book Forget Baudrillard, co-written with Baudrillard.

            May 1968 is written as the year that punk began its rise to glory, led by Malcolm McLaren who brought Situationist precepts, from Paris’ dada movement, to the spotlight of the music industry in Britain. This, according to Reynolds and Oldfield, was the first time in history that an active engagement in detournment, “the recycling of the dominant culture through collage and misappropriation,” was employed by aware actors to subvert mainstream culture. This was a monumental event, the authors argue, because the musicians were not just destructing social norms, but were doing so with an awareness of the power of destruction and youth rebellion. Because their media manipulation was polished by McLaren’s arsenal of Situationist techniques, youth rebellion was perfected in 1968, artists were aware of what they were doing as they were doing it, and, therefore, Reynolds and Oldfield argue, a movement occurring 20 years later was blunted by the original history charted by its punk predecessors.

            Reynolds and Oldfield then write that when the Sex Pistols were signed to Virgin records, making them a “working, selling” band, McLaren’s techniques to bring them to the spotlight were then disproved. They attribute the Situationist’s “error” as imagining the “dreams” of taking what one wanted in the name of art in order to overwhelm and undermine culture in order to affect change as impossible. The Situationist dreams of “unbounded bliss and heaven on earth” were never realized; therefore, their dreams were the impossible dream of idealism. Because the effect was lesser than the goal, Reynolds and Oldfield and other scholars documenting subcultures contend, the effect from punk rock’s rise into mainstream in 1968 led only to influence future movements whose identities were fragmented by a legacy lost by imperfection and failure in the sense that 1968 did not succeed entirely in changing the world. The disenfranchised still remained disenfranchised, so 1988’s rise to sampling and incendiary reproductive works are evidence, they argue, that youth subculture music has “reached the end of pop’s book, and that all that’s left to do is to flick back through the pages, let the brassiest moments flash before our eyes.”

            But Reynolds and Oldfield and academics emboldening the postmodern classification of future subcultural movements mistake the lack of a direct response by musicians in the 1980s to loftier academic postmodern criticisms as the absence of a response altogether. But future musicians did respond. Disaffected youth continued to create music that was passionate, politically charged, and based on subversion. It is music with the same arsenal of tools indoctrinated by legendary forerunners like the Sex Pistols, but is distinct with a new moral sensibility, even purer understanding of anti-consumerist techniques, and subversive anger that is even more effective in its understatement and inclusion. Art is not dead. It is growing exponentially. The identity of current subcultures is not fragmented nor diminished by the grand scale of the past. Nor is the grand scale of the past a measure for current subcultural identity.

            The success of subculture ought not be judged by potency, but, rather, success for subculture lies in its poignancy. The media and academics are the not the arbitrators of historical significance—only time can unfold the extent of influence; time alone denotes the landmarks of change. The invention of postmodernism was not the end of subculture originality, it was merely the end of subculture judging itself by the standards of dominant culture, the standards of academics and journalists who relayed the subdominant messages of the past. Subculture no longer needs the media to liaise its message. The modern internet culture, advances in music distribution, and sophistication of youth consumers have made music more accessible, allowing the voices of dissent to affront the media’s postmodern critiques without retribution. Punk did not fail to achieve its goals: its success is evident because it has kept the dream alive for the new generation of artists that embody particular subcultures. The energy of anger proceeds today with a force tantamount to the past.

            The new generation of subculture artists continues to create original art with even greater effect on future generations than past subcultures. First documenting the origin of British subculture, this paper will analyze its evolution and consequence on the modern generation using music as the dominant voice of disenfranchised youth. Modern British subculture music is not fragmented, but rather is a more representative, pure, and coherent voice of social “outsiders,” independent of the need for approval by the mainstream. Its message is more articulate and its identity is more true to its intent to defend the disenfranchised individual. Modern British music has eschewed exclusion as a means for empowerment; it has invented a new argot for subversion by pointing out both the inherence of exclusion by the British class system and the hypocrisy in prior subcultural movement in excluding those already excluded from dominant culture. The voices of youth disenfranchised by British class and hegemony, modern musicians contend, are not inextricably linked to identity to a subcultural group. Their voices are the voices of individuals who lack a feeling of belonging to any group that has been validated as legitimate by the mainstream. What postmodern scholars call a fragmented identity is really a rejection of validating identity complicit to group expression. Thusly, the effect of subculture for disenfranchised individuals, the change it evokes, however discrete, is the most important measure for success. Modern subculture musicians in Britain are embracing bottom up approach to change—how music inspires individuals—rather than the top down measure—how their music impacts society—used by the previous generation.

3: “We don’t have the imagination to write these words and not know what they mean.”

            The end of World War II marked the rise of youth subcultures in Britain. Disposable income grew at a much faster pace than the general level of cultural sophistication, awareness, and education. The influx of economic power affected all of Britain and led the country to consider the modern existence of class hierarchy. While many, evidencing newfound consumer affluence among British youth, argued class distinctions no longer existed, far more Englanders found themselves still limited by class, with lives, opportunities, and mores consistent with and subjected to birthrights. Young Britannia recognized the Americanization of England, and, with the commodities ensuing from this new international alliance, they had the resources to speak out, forge an exclusive identity, and exorcise their burgeoning sex drive by creating a market, tragically invoked by capitalist freedom, which related to young people’s despondency and, more aptly, anger, while offering an escape from their daily malaise.

            The product was style. It was expressed initially in fashion but packaged, marketed, and made profitable by the growing music industry. The infusion of sex appeal, television, and suggestive lyrics was clearly successful in garnering media attention in America, and British profiteers mimicked the success of youth-oriented media stars such as Elvis Presley by versioning his success with a more refined, more British, sensibility. As young stars like Tommy Steele emerged, progressive capitalists found a niche market in youth. Likewise, youths found themselves center stage with this phenomena, though censored by more mature management; only a young person could provide the sex appeal and relatable sentiments which sustained this new market. Undeniable, the new youth-centric market was exploited by conservatives as an illustration of working class spending, thusly the dissolution of a class system.

            Scholars like Mark Abrams in his book Teenage Consumers studied teenage consumption and concluded classless consumption. Eager to write off class divisions as a means to ease social strife, the new youth-based market was the study group for dissolution of class, yet Abrams, and others, used class rhetoric to deny social classes. Perhaps only swirling in upper-class circles, young, lower-class Britain still felt divided. And the irony of disproving social class by noting class divisions only angered newly empowered youth. This anger in conjunction with the power of a youth market forged a breeding ground for individual expression. Equip with media’s megaphone, emboldened with spending power, accented by an attentive and fearful parental influence, and angered by rhetoric that contradicted reality, British lower-class youth bore subculture as an exclusionary mechanism, artfully retorting upper-class rhetoric. England had acquainted itself with classless American principles. Resultantly, youth created localized norms; young people classified themselves.

4. “You will never understand how it feels to live your life with no meaning or control and with nowhere left to go.”

            The Teddy Boys, or Teds, rose as the first evidence of a youth-based, working-class style. Frocked in Edwardian dress, Teds were immediately dubbed outsiders. Scorned by the media and academics, Teds made a statement, however unintentional, that delineated themselves from traditionalism. Teds pronounced themselves as outsiders, directly opposing cultural norms. They mimicked the standards for youth and crossed lines that previously helped the rich to inculcate power. By adorning distinctive uniforms, their style contradicted classlessness. Irony made them noticed, and their mimicry, mocking the upper class, got attention by making the dominant culture afraid that their identity could be parodied. Their mode of dress made Teds distinct; it offended the media; and, most importantly, the way they dressed allied them in a recognizable manner with other working class youths.

            But if style was their only offense to traditional hegemony, then the Teds’ statement would not have posed such a distinct threat. Because a certain type of young person, with certain habits, from certain families, with distinct socioeconomic potential and accompanying futures, dressed this way, Teds became an easy target for the media. Their dress was a categorical means to be noticed, and it gained cachet beyond the confines of a single neighborhood. It must have worked to gain some end for the youngsters who joined the Teddy Boys, if for no other reason than giving working class youth an identity amidst a tirade of propaganda that attempted to strip their prior class-based identity. To identify with an inherent inequity that was disqualified by the establishment, Teds stumbled upon the first tool in the arsenal of youth power: striking fear garners attention. The made the dominant culture afraid that the way they dressed was no longer a source of identity exclusively held by the dominant culture.

            Working-class youth found a way to make their anger heard by the mainstream. The establishment, educated academics and media, made “class hierarchy” an illegitimate complaint about economic disparity amongst Englanders, so working-class youth developed a new criterion to express their anger. Anger was an energy released by style. Youth expression made those denying class reconsider the existence of a group completely outside their homogenized community. While broad media and cultural sentiments embraced the post-war alliance with America, capitalism and increased consumerism did not avail the “American Dream” universally to Englanders.

5. “Record company man, I won’t be coming to dinner.”

            Colin MacInnes inadvertently invalidates the bourgeoisie propaganda asserting that increased consumerism meant dissolution of class distinctions. The irony in his mistaken contradiction of the classless sentiment was that he intended to do just the opposite in his novel Absolute Beginners: MacInnes’ attempted to explain British teens to the public necessitated class dissolution. He needed to assume the teenage argot, though did so miserably as a mid-thirties man, in order to credential his novel, and simultaneously had a well-intentioned desire for calm, order, and “quietism” under the impression that the existence of class counteracted these virtues. MacInnes was under the impression that he needed to deny class distinctions in order to avoid strife and appeal to both youth and adults. To MacInnes, getting rid of class distinctions meant progress in making teenagers better understood by adults. He needed to express universalities in youth, he needed to make youth “classless,” to make salable his point that the conflict in society was between youth and adults rather than classes. The newly posed threat of youth, the fear the Teds incited, was because of adult misunderstandings of modern youth, and was not representative of all youth. The Teds violent and disruptive impression disseminated by the media was pitted as the uneducated extremist representation of inferior youth. MacInnes thought he was documenting youth and rock, allaying the Teds as a poor example, but in retrospect he documented the first youth subculture, the Teds, a group that involved only working class.

            In his essay “England, Half English,” MacInnes says the teenage phenomenon that arose after the Second World War could be explained by the pop phenomenon of Tommy Steele, Elvis’s British, more polished, counterpart. MacInnes notes Steele’s “battle for a place among the top twenty" as his attempt to validate the youth voice. In this battle, MacInnes says the only victory that “has been won by British singers” is “at the cost of splitting their personalities and becoming bi-lingual: speaking American at the recording session, and English in the pub round the corner afterwards.”

            MacInnes, however, evidences assimilation with America by British youth icons, yet fails to recognize youths’ counterpoint: style was not an economic phenomenon evidenced by youth consumer spending but was also a class-based phenomenon evidenced by distinct styles created by working class youth. Trends forged by the lower class threatened tradition. As such, lower-class stylization catching on as fashionable became categorized as radical by bourgeois hegemony. A sea change in class elimination was initially seen without consequence, but British youths were beginning to be noticed. British lower-class youth culture was—being seen—by elite Englanders previously able to disregard lower classes.

            Misunderstood youth found a way to articulate social misunderstandings about them by creating subcultures; they discovered and broadened artistic expression into a lethal force capable of killing social constructs. Still misunderstood, and improperly articulated by outsiders like MacInnes, the Teds opened the door for a future that could affect change. They were not silly, primitive figures representative of a discrete moment in British youth history. But the wake of the art school phenomenon and intellectual credentialing of future movements, showed MacInnes’ efforts were problematic in their reduction of teen culture—the Teds—as a single phenomenon in the chronology of a greater British history.

            Subculture was a departure from the dominant culture, therefore its expressions of anger were not geared toward ageism against youth but rather economic discrimination against the working class youth. Consumerism was touted by the media as evidence of a bright, classless future for all British youth, but the powerful anger that is necessary for subculture arose only from the infuriation of poor youth who distained this media claim. Amassing a contingent of young people from working class families, the initial expression of youth subculture by the Teds still was at the mercy of non-working-class journalists and academics, who were validated by education unavailable to working classmen, and, as outsiders, their attempted document of youth subculture’s early development merely reinforced its origin—social division separates its groupings, creating an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ reality, and, though the Teds found a way to broach the attention of the other group, their purpose was documented by outsiders. Working-class youth had a face but lacked a voice.

6: “Some mothers talk about Guns n’ Roses, as if I give a fuck, I’ve listened and they suck. I’m too preoccupied with my memories, oh not entities.”

            Every child reaches a point where he or she realizes his parents are not the extent of authority in life. Every young person eventually learns that his or her parents are human being just like them. When this realization takes hold, young people begin to assert their independence, by questioning authority and rebelling against the trappings of dependence that are inherent in childhood. Teenagers are rebellious because of a resentment of disproportional authority accorded to their parents. It seems unfair that parents make the rules and they have to abide by them. It is unfair that they cannot make their own rules, and have no authority to assert rules on their parents. Coupled with an infusion of hormones into pubescent bodies which is equally forbidden to be expressed, teenagers are naturally rebellious because they feel repressed—they are unable to make their own decisions, to have a voice against authority, to be considered equal, and to be able to act on their hormonal tendencies to explore the pleasure of sex, without fear of getting caught. When teens find venues to escape this repression, they cling to them as sources of liberation. For some, liberation is found on the streets with friends, some find it at school, some find it by leaving home entirely, and some find it as a combination of those things or as the mere eventuality of waiting to turn a certain age and be entitled to leave their parental trappings.

            But eventually all teenagers discover their independence as either a cold, hard shock that means they have to take care of themselves or as a welcome reprieve to the hell that is home. The severity and extent of either of those eventualities differs among teenagers, but both severity and extent are clearly defined by a teen’s home circumstance. A home’s comfort is certainly a factor in the extent of teenage desire to get away from it. Therefore, living conditions play an important part in the degree of rebellion for youth.

            Therefore, it is no surprise that British working class youth found themselves on the streets more often than the children of elites. Whether caused by poor living conditions, parents who were always home, no place besides the streets to get away from parents, or a lack of parental authority in working class homes, working class youth amassed in groups that were free to congregate in an environment absent of adult control, or repression, which fostered the liberation of teenage rebellion into a form of expression that sought to upset the order imposed in their lives by all sources of authority. And because authority was imposed for working class Britain in economic limitations set forth by the British elite, working class rebellion for teens was directed beyond immediate authorities to the elites who imposed restrictions on them because of their economic situation. This dual rebellion against limits imposed because of both age and class is ultimately why youth subculture found its roots in the working class. More importantly, the inherent desire for teens to rebel against repression, shows why subculture, a product of rebellion, is naturally born by the youth, and the environment that British working class youth found themselves in availed an environment that both coddled their drive to escape limitations imposed by adults and their need to express discontent with larger social limitations imposed by the upper class.

            Therefore, after subculture evolved and became more sophisticated, self aware, accessible, and British society witnessed various movements, each one more threatening and well equip than the last, the end of punk, the most politically vigorous and intellectual of any noted youth subculture, was glorified as the end of the modern age of youth rebellion—the death of modern youth potency, originality, and notoriety. The magnanimity of punk rock, its scope, lastingness, and versatility, pushed many limits, and by pushing the limits of offensiveness, modern youth subcultures were preempted in the 1980s by scholars who disenfranchised future youth and subdominant artists from claiming success in creation of originality. These scholars said that modern youth originality in subculture was merely a collage of the past. Punk was the end product of a consumer society in Britain that prompted youth to rebel, and had perfected the craft by imposing subdominant values into mainstream awareness. Punk was now mainstream, and bastardized by an infusion of other musical genres, critics assert, so punk succeeded in bringing subculture into the dominant culture. Therefore subculture was dead as it availed itself to the dominant culture. Subculture had sold out officially, and the growth of hip-hop, rave, and indie cultures in the 1980s and 1990s were no longer the voice of the disenfranchised but rather the vehicle for the disenfranchised to elevate themselves through fame, recognition, and money. The involvement of subculture music into the mainstream made it subject to capital constructions subculture was invented undermine. An awareness and recognition of punk’s impact, judged by its commercial success and notoriety, would limit future youth cultures to equate their impact with commercial success and taint the discreteness and originality of their subculture. Because punk was seen as not just a music genre, the punk subculture was seen as the epitome of subculture, holding future subculture legitimacy to the standards of success by which punk subculture had revolutionized society.

            Punk had assassinated subculture by making it a culture no longer capable of having an exclusive belief system; post-punk, youth were no longer disenfranchised, and subsequent cultures of likeminded young persons expressing discontent were enfranchised by the power of subversion through style proven by punk therefore their discontent lacked a clear drive for originality. The institution of subculture was set as the modern expression of disenfranchised youth by punk, but the modern period had been declared over in light of a postmodern future, whose awareness of the existence of subculture devalued its creation. Cause cannot be realized before effect, Lotringer said, therefore artists who are aware of why they are creating art cannot create art knowing its potential effect. An effect is original only if it is unexpected and left to determine in retrospect. Now that the effects of subculture had been seen, the cause of subdominant, disenfranchised youth expression has the foresight of its effects. Elements of all modern genres of music include elements of the past. Punk defined those elements, therefore modern genres are unoriginal, postmodernism argues.

            The definitiveness of postmodernity, however, is as definitive as man’s ability to know the future. It made sense to academics, was an easy answer for scholars, and was unimportant to musicians who continued to create music as they always had. But postmodernism’s greatest flaw was to declare subculture dead, to declare future cultures less pure in the wake of cultural awareness and subcultural definition.

            Postmodernism ignores the absence of itself. When punk was created, or when any subculture deemed expressive of an original youth identity emerged, they, too, emerged as a result of the past. If the Teds had not found a way to get society to pay attention to working class youth, the mods, rockers, and punks might not have ever been created. The effects of any movement are foreseen by luminaries inciting a new movement. The success of punk owes much to its roots—movements like Dadaism, the rise of westerns in cinema, literature of the working class, styles of generations passed—and nothing exists in a vacuum removed from history. To argue that postmodernism is the fate of subculture is to argue that retrospect and references to the past were absent in the formation of British youth subcultures. Subculture may have been defined unintentionally, mutated into a more accessible and referential craft, but it is not an end in and of itself. The effects of subculture were not known when it was caused, but the effects of modern day youth expressions and revolt are equally unpredictable. Punk was revolutionary, without doubt, but the revolution was immortalized in retrospect. Significance can only be accorded in retrospect. Shakespeare did not destroy the presence of great future writers, nor do Aristotle and Plato have categorical claims on philosophy. The availing of subculture by the punk movement does not exclude future subcultural pioneers, and, despite claims that modern identity is fragmented by an awareness of the past and definition of the process of subversion, identities are still being created that are coherent, original, and imaginative, and subversion is still an effective tool as new methods and venues for expression are invented. In sum, many modern artists are not debilitated by knowledge about the past of art, and the awareness by the next generation of disenfranchised youth of past music, cultures, and methods is not instantaneous nor implicit. Many rebellious teens pick up a guitar or write a poem with no knowledge about the lore of punk rock and subcultures. Their voices are no less original than their predecessors, their scenes are no less important or effective than scenes of the past, and the vigor of political expression and writing from the past does not trump the possibility of greater vigor in the future. As long as society excludes certain members, those members will feel like outsiders. As long as young people desire independence, they will find ways to rebel. As long as people feel discontent, they will excise it. And as long as inequities exist, the disenfranchised will be angered by their subdominance.

7: “Nobody writes them like they used to so it may as well be me.”

            It's now up to us to Create Austin.